Reading is increasingly losing ground to more visual media such as TV, and computer games (To read or not to read, 2007, NEA; Nov. 26, 2007, Newsweek, the future of reading). Approximately half of Americans between 18 and 24 years of age do not read any books for pleasure, and fewer than one-third of 13-year-olds read daily (Id. at page 7). Teenagers and adults 15-34 years old average only 7-9 minutes leisure reading daily, while averaging more than two hours on a typical weekday watching TV (Id.). Also, Americans average 58 minutes (male) and 44 minutes (female) each weekday playing videogames (Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, July 2007).
Readers create and update situation models from the stories they read. These situation models, created as people read text narratives, typically include information about time frame, causality, protagonists performing actions, and protagonist motivations/goals and spatial details of setting (Rinck, 2005; Zwaan, 1995). However, spatial information, about where things happen, is often ignored in these situation models under naturalistic reading conditions (Rinck, 2005; Zwaan, & van Oostendorp, 1994).
As people read text narratives, they focus on the surface features of the text, the particulars of the words, phrases and sentences. Readers also focus on the deeper content in the text, the situation described, to create a situation model of the story (Graesser, Millis, & Zwaan, 1997; Rinck, 2005). As people read sentence by sentence in a story, they update their situation model to reflect changes in these dimensions: 1) temporal (time frame of events), 2) causal (how one thing causes other things to happen), 3) protagonist dimension (who is currently performing the actions in the story), 4) intentionality dimension (the goal(s) of the characters) and 5) spatial (where things happen) (Zwaan, Langston and Graesser, 1995). Since, causal and temporal dimensions are fundamental to storytelling and grammatically embedded in language, then tend to be well represented in readers' situation models. However, for a variety of reasons, the spatial dimension is the poorest handled dimension (Zwaan and van Oostendorp, 1994).
Under naturalistic conditions, readers tend to opt out of maintaining a spatial situation model of even moderately complex spaces (Shah & Miyake, 2005). Spatial details of the setting of a text-based story are generally not central to the structure of the story. In (Zwaan, Radvansky, Hilliard, & Curiel (1998)), temporal, causal, protagonist and goal discontinuities all resulted in increased reading times, while spatial discontinuities did not. Part of the explanation may be the linearization problem, e.g., that text narratives are inherently linear and space is inherently non-linear (Zwaan and Radvansky, 1998), making it difficult to represent space from reading a text. Moreover, mental imagery is sometimes required to model a spatial setting from a story. The mental imagery needed to model a space is not automatic, but requires an effort of will (Hasher and Zacks, 1979).
There are exceptions in certain genres, where readers under naturalistic conditions make the effort to model the spatial situation. At the beginning of a detective story, a detailed description of the spatial arrangement of objects in a room warrants great attention, as seemingly innocuous objects and their locations may later provide clues to solving the crime. Also, in military history, the setting, configurations of battle terrain and locations of actions are fundamental to causation, such as an encircling maneuver or attacks from higher towards lower ground.
Students who are spatially strong, yet verbally weak, are often “turned off” by books and K-12 education, which tends to emphasize verbal, symbolic outcomes, while shortchanging visuospatial outcomes (Silverman, 1989; Smith, 1964). Yet, at a societal level, there is an unmet demand for visuospatial skills, which are vital for sciences, engineering, and other fields (Humphreys, Lubinski, & Yao, 1993).
Books stimulate the imagination more than visual electronic media because readers must construct more of the details of the story in their mind (Greenfield, 1993). Playing computer games may improve spatial skills (Okagaki & Frensch, 1994; Greenfield, 1994), while reading, watching TV and movies generally do not (Greenfield, 1993). One fundamental difference is that computer games make players accountable for the spatial setting, while books, movies and TV do not. Players of many computer games are accountable for where things happen and the layout of the virtual space (Greenfield, 1993). However, in naturalistic reading of text narratives, the spatial dimension is largely ignored.
Current products designed to stimulate learning and book reading involve interactive systems that provide sensory stimuli, like sounds, based on a reader's input. For example, the LeapPad, depicted in FIG. 1, is a commercial “interactive storybook [for children that lets the reader] touch the books' pages with a ‘Magic Pencil’ device to hear letter sounds and words read aloud, make characters ‘come alive’ and play learning activities,” (LeapFrog, 2007). The pages of the LeapPad books rest on a portable electronic console with an attached stylus (“magic pencil”) that provides context sensitive audio feedback when the user clicks on places on the page. Another variation of electronic reading is the integration of hardcopy books with related Web-based computer games. Scholastic plans the sale of a series of books (“The 39 clues”) with associated Web-based games (“Scholastic plans to put its branding iron on a successor to Harry Potter”, New York times, Dec. 18, 2007, section B1).
Additionally, various forms of purely computer-based reading combine elements of story and game. For example, interactive fiction provides a fictitious world in which the reader will often assume the role of the protagonist in a branching narrative. The reader/player makes choices that determine which of a number of pre-determined branches the story takes. Typically, interactive fiction is implemented with a computer program with text as input and output, but more recent versions of interaction fiction also use pictures and interaction with a mouse. Typically, there is a “structure of rules within which an outcome is sought”, and “which produces narrative during interaction” (Monfort, 2007). Purely text-based computer games have largely fallen by the wayside, with the tremendous popularity of modern video/computer games with sophisticated computer graphics. However, interactive fiction such as Haunstetter (2008), which often combines text with graphics, may bring the genre back through the educational market.
The current invention imparts accountability to boost the spatial dimension of a situation model created while reading a text narrative, by transferring some of the spatial accountability common in video/computer games to the reading of linear text narratives (e.g., text-based stories).